Social Inequality In Canada Dimensions Of Disadvantage Pdf

[Gaetan Horton]

SocialInequality in Canada explores the many dimensions of social disadvantage and injustice that exist in Canada today. Beginning with a thorough examination of structural inequality issues before moving on to address the wide-ranging impact that social inequality can have, the text presents students with a comprehensive overview of the persistent patterns of inequality as well as the progress that has been made.

Climate change is deeply intertwined with global patterns of inequality. The poorest and most vulnerable people bear the brunt of climate change impacts yet contribute the least to the crisis. As the impacts of climate change mount, millions of vulnerable people face disproportionate challenges in terms of extreme events, health effects, food, water, and livelihood security, migration and forced displacement, loss of cultural identity, and other related risks.

Certain social groups are particularly vulnerable to crises, for example, female-headed households, children, persons with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples and ethnic minorities, landless tenants, migrant workers, displaced persons, sexual and gender minorities, older people, and other socially marginalized groups. The root causes of their vulnerability lie in a combination of their geographical locations; their financial, socio-economic, cultural, and gender status; and their access to resources, services, decision-making power, and justice.

The World Bank is committed to promoting socially equitable responses to global crises. As we adapt to a changing climate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important that we listen to, and learn from, people and communities. That is why a truly inclusive approach can often begin at the community level. Green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and transitioning to low-carbon, climate resilient development requires considering action on climate change in an immediate and broad social context and recognizing the urgency of present needs, while plotting an ambitious course to decarbonization. The World Bank supports achievement of these objectives through three key areas of activity:

Channeling resources and decision-making power to support locally-led climate action: Supporting devolved climate finance and community and local development approaches and that empower communities to drive a climate agenda in support of their development goals; promoting greater transparency and accountability on climate finance; aligning and linking locally led climate action to national climate change priorities and strategies; supporting work to strengthen M&E of resilience and adaptation.

Facilitating processes needed to support key transitions: Engaging communities and citizens in climate decision-making and enhancing social learning as a form of regulatory feedback (e.g., citizen engagement, national climate dialogues, and improved governance); building awareness and political will amongst governments and partners on the need to understand and address the social dimensions of climate change and green growth.

Through these areas of action, the World Bank fosters strong collaboration across different practice areas to bring together and empower poor communities and marginalized social groups to reduce risks to future crises; and to bridge the gap between the local, subnational, and national levels for effective climate change support.

The World Bank has recognized the need to support locally led climate action and work with communities as equal partners so that we are building on their experience and expertise in managing risk and adapting to climate change and to transitions. In other sectors, the World Bank has invested in community and local development (CLD) operations that emphasize citizen control over investment development planning and decision making and implementation. For decades, CLD has effectively supported basic service delivery, livelihoods, social services, poverty reduction, and other community priorities at a large scale. Over $30 billion has been invested in CLD programs over the past decade. This same mechanism is now being harnessed and adapted to deliver effective, local climate resilience support at the necessary scale and its core principles of citizen control and social inclusion are being integrated into innovative approaches to decentralized climate finance.

In Kenya, the World Bank is working with the national and county governments to channel climate finance and decision-making to people at the local level to design solutions that meet their specific needs. Through the Financing Locally Led Climate Action program (FLLoCA), county governments are supported to work in partnership with communities to assess climate risks and identify socially inclusive solutions that are tailored to local needs and priorities. The FLLoCA Program in Kenya provides the first national-scale model of devolved climate finance that can be replicated in other countries.

In Bangladesh, the Nuton Jibon project considers extreme weather events in its design with communities who undertake participatory risk analyses, which then informs the locations and design of community centers, rural roads, tube wells, and other works.

CLD programs are also responding to the impact of COVID-19, including cash transfers for vulnerable groups and block grants to communities to reach vulnerable households with food and medical supplies. Lessons from previous pandemics, including the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak, highlight the importance of social responses to crisis management and recovery to complement medical efforts. In the case of COVID-19, partnerships between communities, healthcare systems, local governments, and the private sector have played a critical role in slowing the spread, mitigating impacts, and supporting local recovery.

The World Bank also hosts the Climate Investment Funds, which is particularly relevant to the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus (REDD+) agenda. Given their close relationships with and dependence on forested lands and resources, Indigenous Peoples are key stakeholders in CIF and REDD+. Specific initiatives in this sphere include: a Dedicated Grant Mechanism (DGM) for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities under the Forest Investment Program (FIP) in multiple countries; a capacity building program oriented partly toward Forest-Dependent Indigenous Peoples by the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF); support for enhanced participation of Indigenous peoples in benefit sharing of carbon emission reduction programs through the Enhancing Access to Benefits while Lowering Emissions (EnABLE) multi-donor trust fund; and analytical, strategic planning, and operational activities in the context of the FCPF and the BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL).

While this work is still unfolding, it includes such activities as: mapping out the political economy of carbon-related sectors and identifying ways to engage stakeholders in sector reform; ensuring that projects are designed so that local communities can benefit equitably and meaningfully from green growth investments; undertaking gender and vulnerability analysis to identify gaps and ensuring the participation of women and underrepresented groups in decision making on green recovery programs; promoting transparency, access to information and citizen engagement on climate risk and green growth in order to create coalitions of support or public demand to reduce climate impacts; and, supporting local or national dialogues for just transition and green recovery decision making.

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Intersectionality theory, a way of understanding social inequalities by race, gender, class, and sexuality that emphasizes their mutually constitutive natures, possesses potential to uncover and explicate previously unknown health inequalities. In this paper, the intersectionality principles of "directionality," "simultaneity," "multiplicativity," and "multiple jeopardy" are applied to inequalities in self-rated health by race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in a Canadian sample.

The Canadian Community Health Survey 2.1 (N = 90,310) provided nationally representative data that enabled binary logistic regression modeling on fair/poor self-rated health in two analytical stages. The additive stage involved regressing self-rated health on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation singly and then as a set. The intersectional stage involved consideration of two-way and three-way interaction terms between the inequality variables added to the full additive model created in the previous stage.

From an additive perspective, poor self-rated health outcomes were reported by respondents claiming Aboriginal, Asian, or South Asian affiliations, lower class respondents, and bisexual respondents. However, each axis of inequality interacted significantly with at least one other: multiple jeopardy pertained to poor homosexuals and to South Asian women who were at unexpectedly high risks of fair/poor self-rated health and mitigating effects were experienced by poor women and by poor Asian Canadians who were less likely than expected to report fair/poor health.

Although a variety of intersections between race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were associated with especially high risks of fair/poor self-rated health, they were not all consistent with the predictions of intersectionality theory. I conclude that an intersectionality theory well suited for explicating health inequalities in Canada should be capable of accommodating axis intersections of multiple kinds and qualities.

Sizeable health inequalities by race [1, 2], gender [3, 4] and class [5] have been recorded in Canada. Consistent with traditional sociological understandings of social inequality, these axes of inequality have for the most part been considered individually, with researchers only considering potential interconnectedness when investigating whether class mediates associations between race and health or gender and health. Whether class influences health differently for visible minority Canadians and White Canadians or race influences health differently for men and women, for example, has not yet been investigated. When statistical interactions such as these have received analytical attention - for example, whether class influences health differently for Canadian men and women [3] - they have not been adequately theorized. Intersectionality theory, an influential theoretical tradition inspired by the feminist and antiracist traditions, demands that inequalities by race, gender, and class (and sexuality as well) be considered in tandem rather than distinctly. This is because these fundamental axes of inequality in contemporary societies are considered to be intrinsically entwined; they mutually constitute and reinforce one another and as such cannot be disentangled from one another. Intersectionality theory presents a new way of understanding social inequalities that possesses potential to uncover and explicate previously unknown health inequalities. This paper describes the results of an original empirical investigation of the degree to which the self-rated health of Canadians varies by race, gender, class, and/or sexual orientation in ways that are consistent with predictions of intersectionality theory. The remainder of this background section describes some of the central principles of this theoretical tradition followed by a description of the analytical strategy used to apply these principles in an empirical investigation of inequalities in self-rated health in Canada.

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